Writing & build logs.
Essays on software development, web builds, and AI tooling. Plus build notes from what I'm actually working on right now.
The verifier should gate sentences, not articles. A rescued mortgage draft showed why.
The April mortgage rate-spike draft had been queued for weeks. When the Monday cron finally produced it, 10 of 13 sentences passed verification. The right call was to fix the three that didn’t — not discard the article. That distinction reshapes the pipeline.
Eight clusters triaged, zero published: why autonomous content cadence fails silently
The UK Calculators content pipeline ran three clean cron exits and published nothing for three weekdays. No errors, no alerts, just absence. Three weeks of daily runs showed the failure mode is not bad drafts. It is a gate that rejects everything differently each day, and a cadence monitor that asks the wrong question.
The cron kept drafting mortgage because gov.uk wasn't in the source set yet
For five days, the cron produced news-cluster drafts and operators shipped gov.uk regulatory pillars by hand. Day 6 changed one thing: gov.uk Search API sources entered the polling loop. Two data-pegged pillars from a single cycle followed immediately.
The in-chapter TOC needed live JavaScript. It still got a mockup first.
The captainrandom learning hub navigation retrofit ran five phases. Every one went through the UI gate — interactive approval mockup before production code. The most interesting case was P4: the subsystem's only client-side component, with a live IntersectionObserver scroll-spy in its mockup, still approved before a line of React was written.
The privacy work isn't on the /privacy/ page
The /privacy/ page went live in June and covers what it covers. The actual privacy work on this site happened in a data-locality choice, a brand-separation rule, and a username leak in published MDX. Only one of the three announced itself.